Being focused often comes at the expense of my office desktop surface area. Since I’m known as a proficient pile herder, I thought I’d try my hand at herding the above pile of magazines, ripped-out articles, lose notes and other content into the trash while first mining the following persistent notes of interest.

• “Bits to Atoms” – “…display becomes wallpaper you scroll, and if you want more display, you add more wallpaper. If your server needs more resources, you open the top and pour in more server.” -Neil Gershenfeld, Director, Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT
• After reading John Grisham’s The Broker while on vacation, I now know that adesso is Italian for “now.”
• “No Private Vistas” – “Look at the big picture [of Vista's repeated delays], and you’ll see a nasty object in what happens when you (and others) put too much trust in your ability to deliver software.” -Frank Hayes
• “Simple Minds” -The current obsession with simplicity beats making products stupidly complex. But it’s built on at least one false premise, that less is more. More is more, and it always has been and always will be. Good products can and should be feature-rich, ladden with information, and easy to use.” -Paul Kedrosky
• …but, “Are More Features Always Better?“
• “Evolve or Fail” and “Where’s Your Edge? “
• “Virtualization’s Real Impact” – “[In 10 years] You’ll no longer think of a server as being something other than how you think of a disk in a disk array today.” – Mendel Rosenblum, co-founder and Chief Scientist, VMware
• “Many Ways to Pretend” – “If misleading terminology were a crime, Microsoft’s Virtual PC for Mac would deserve the death penalty.” – Tom Yager
• “Doing Things Right” (derived from “Web 2.0“) – “The fact that Google is a ‘Web 2.0′ company shows that, while meaningful, the term is also rather bogus. It’s like the word allopathic. It just means doing things right, and it’s a bad sign when you have to have a special word for that.” -Paul Graham, author, Hackers and Painters
• “Getting Real” – DARPA’s Real-World Reasoning Project (beyond brute force)

Ah…now that was cathartic!